“These aren’t credit cards, but this is a tier-one breach,” said Ingevaldson. “These credentials are like the iron ore of the cybercrime industry.”
Ingevaldson discovered the data breach by noticing a posting by the allegedly responsible for the data theft, which used the alias ‘Mastermind,’ on an online forum used by criminals for sale illegal products. The collection of stolen data includes email addresses related to nearly 345,000 different domain names.
“Seven million of the people that logged in to the St. Petersburg-based dating site used Hotmail.com, 2.5 million used Yahoo.com, and 2.3 million used Gmail.com.” reported Blooberg
Unfortunately cases like this are not isolated, investigators are waiting for a domino effect in the coming weeks that may result in the impairment of several accout used by victims online.
Stay Tuned …
January 26 – UPDATE
Topface published the statement below :
Concerning the information that 20 mln user names and emails of Topface users were hacked we would like to state the following:
1. At the moment we do not have any proven information that any data was stolen from Topface. We have a sophisticated security system and will investigate whether we were hacked or not.
2. Almost all our users use Facebook and other social networks authorisation to access Topface and we have no access to their passwords or any secure data. We also never keep any payment information or other secure information about our users. All the data that we have is e-mail address which can not be used alone to access any secure data. That is why we a pretty sure that our users will not have any problems even if any data wass stolen from our service.
(Security Affairs – Topface, data breach)